This picture does a nice job summing up everything that’s wrong with people on the Internet. Well, ok, it doesn’t do all that. It does, though, demonstrate how complete and casual the disregard for truth is in the construction of clickbait. It’s not merely that this picture never happened, that there never was a tour boat somehow perched on the breast of a breaching humpback. Creating a fake image does not in itself demonstrate your absolute depravity. It takes a couple extra details to accomplish that.

First, the red circle around a person apparently free-falling from high above at the very moment this whale carried the tour boat aloft. This red circle is supposed to focus our attention on that spot. It identifies a crucial detail in the scene, a detail we might otherwise overlook; But, it’s a critical detail of a scene that never happened and never could. There is nothing, in fact, within the red dot to see, except a human figure reduced to the suggestion of someone in imminent, and likely fatal, distress.

The red circle calling out this critical detail of an absurdly impossible scene is carefully constructed to suggested the viewer into experience of mortality salience. It is meant, that is, to spark a primal anxiety, so that it might frame the information it offers as a solution to this state.

And yeah, that’s all shitty enough, but that still doesn’t rise to the level of utter human depravity. What pushes it over the top is the text beneath the image:

It is so depraved as to be hard to unpack.